A North Korea Reading List

I tend to read in themes. Which some would call obsessive, but I view as efficient. If you’re enjoying one pastoral novel from the 19th century, why not experience a good sample, say another five or six, to see if you’re drawn to the subject matter, the style or merely the characteristics of that first book’s plot and characters?

The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future by Victor Cha. A wide ranging and excellent overview of North Korea, including extracts from many defector accounts, insights into the human rights situation, first hand descriptions of diplomatic events during and since the 2nd Bush administration and really interesting analysis of DPRK’s politics and economics. The first book I read on this topic and the most comprehensive I’ve come across so far. Some of the quotes from humanitarian reports are the most disturbing I have ever read.

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick. Beautifully written and very well executed coverage of the lives of six North Koreans all of whom were from the city of Chongjin. It covers the 1990s, and is particularly insightful when one wonders how people coped with the famine that stretched from 1994 to the end of the decade, killing North Koreans in the millions. It also is wonderful contextual companion to Victor Cha’s discussion of the role of market activities in relieving pressure on state-run distribution systems while simultaneously raising the populations expectations, causing a shift in power by encouraging entrepreneurial behaviour and allowing a trickle of information that is potentially dangerous to the regime’s control.

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin. I haven’t finished this one, though I’ve read more than half of the book with lots of jumping around. In 800-odd pages it covers the lives of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, drawing on official accounts (ie propaganda), stories from defectors (including transcripts of interviews, which is a fresh way of presenting perspectives after reading previous, edited accounts) and other biographic material (such as files from the Soviet Union released after its collapse). The most interesting pieces I’ve read include Chapter 12, which looks at how socioeconomic status dictates gang behaviour and relationships amongst young men in the country, and Chapter 25, in which one high ranking defector argues that the regime would be very willing to push the nuclear button.

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters by B.R. Myers. An excellent, very insightful book on North Korean ideology. As with Martin’s book above, it draw sheavily on the stories, teachings and art of the regime as a way of understanding the country. But while Martin tends to take these at face value and look for interesting biographical insights or indications of the leaders’ personalities in these sources, Myersapplies a more sociological analysis to drill down a number of layers beneath the propoganda, developing thereby his claim that the worldview of North Korea is “an implacably xenophobic, race-based worldview derived largely from fascist Japanese myth”. Myers argues that to focus on the official “juche” ideas of self-reliance is to mistake it for anything coherent and meaningful, and therefore to miss the far more powerful race-related narrative that lies beneath it. Fascinating.

Other interesting material:

North Korea: Witness to Transformation. This is an excellent, regularly updated North Korea blog by Marcus Noland and Stephen Haggard at the Peterson Institute. Fascinating and very up to date.

United Nations Overview of Needs and Assistance in DPRK 2012. The UN’s overview of needs and assistance for DPRK provides a good scan of the current economic situation in the country and a fairly comprehensive overview of humanitarian issues, including food security, health, nutrition and sanitation, has a brief section on natural disasters, and provides UN agency sector response plans.